Today Paul Mueller from HP shared some insights from a customer and friend of his who leads the Systems Management at a major health insurance provider. In his cleverly titled post, "IT is like salad dressing, sometimes you need to shake it up," he gave three points of advice that led to a 90 percent reduction in production incidents:

"Operations has a voice in requirements - it’s important that the supportability of the application be part of its non-functional requirements. The Operations teams are best positioned to form those requirements."

"App development and QA should be part of operations escalations - this helps to build a shared understanding of real-world use cases for fault isolation and diagnostics."

"Establish common tooling between the two - in his case he focused on common synthetic transaction and load generators, diagnostics and configuration management tools. This not only prevented his development and operations teams doubling up on tools that essentially did the same thing, but facilitated a common bond between Dev and Ops and that helped bridge what was previously a gap."

As with most problems, Mueller says that a DevOps culture cannot be achieved with just tools.